Rebels With A Cause

Danes Stand Alone On Their Right To Smoke Freely

COPENHAGEN — Bracing air and bicycles everywhere. Free hospitals, sand dune beaches and five weeks off every year.

Surely the people of Denmark must be among the healthiest in the Western world. Surely the highly educated Danes are too well-informed to commit slow suicide with cigarettes.

Well, looks can be deceiving. Suffice it to say that if Humphrey Bogart were alive today, he'd want to live in Denmark.

While most Westerners are slowly weaning themselves from tobacco, Danes are making one last stand.

They're not embarrassed that nearly half the population is smoking, easily the highest in Europe; that Denmark is the only European country where women smoke as much as men and where, since 1970, the lifespan of women has fallen from 5th to 18th in the industrialized world; that infant mortality is 110 percent higher for mothers who smoke than for those who don't.

No, Denmark is the country that staged a pro-cigarette symposium in 1992, the International Conference on Tolerance and Courtesy; it was opened on Parliament property by a former environment minister. And Denmark also is the home of Maersk, the Danish airline, where passengers can still smoke at 30,000 feet-cigarettes, naturally, but also pipes and cigars.

Danes can-and do-smoke at work and in restaurants, in schools and in hospitals. There's not even a ban on the sale of cigarettes to minors.

Ask any Dane about all this, and you'll hear the roar of rugged individualism.

"Smoking is my business," said Torben Schwennesen, a refugee worker who has smoked a pack a day for 20 years. "It's more a principle than anything. The authorities should not interfere too much in the citizen's life. This government would never dare. We won't tolerate that kind of power."

Like others, he blames America for the fuss over cigarettes: "It puzzles me how the U.S., land of the free and liberty, has such Puritan thinking. It is a question of living space for the individual."

Stella Thorsen, a secretary who vows to quit now that she's pregnant, said: "There's a popular song here that doesn't translate well to English, but it goes, `We don't want to brush our teeth/We want to stay up late and smoke.' Sounds like it's about teenagers, but it's really about grownups. People here have so many rules to live by that they want to be a little bit naughty."

Danes always bring up the rules that govern their lives, benevolent socialism in action. For example, the national identity card. Don't leave home without it-unless you don't want to buy medicine, take out a library book, rent a video, enroll in a school, go to the hospital, open a bank account, rent a car or get married. And when you move, you must report the new address to the People's Register.

So they draw the line at cigarettes. To Danes, cigarettes are synonymous with hygge-being cozy with friends.

Karsten Kesselring, who runs the Association of Considerate Smokers, said: "We can accept the government being a father to us, but we don't want it to be Big Brother. That's too much."

Maybe this iconoclasm is to be expected. After all, the Danes are known for being free spirits. They needed two referendums to join the European Union. They even ferried all their Jews to Sweden during World War II, under the noses of their Nazi occupiers. And now they're proudly out of step with what Kesselring calls "the health fascists."

And he's not just talking about Americans. The European Union is trying to get its members to have smoke-free airlines (forget it, says Maersk); trying to get members to ban smoking in public places (Denmark has no blanket ban anywhere); and wants to ban all cigarette advertising everywhere in the EU (Denmark is blocking this effort).

Danish role models set the tone.

Kesselring has served on the board of a national education group and the Copenhagen boy scouts. The chief patron of his pro-smoking lobbying group is a former foreign minister who is a top candidate to become the next secretary general of NATO. A Danish pop singer smokes during his shows on TV. A Danish soccer star, Preban Elkar, smokes a pack a day. As Thorsen said, "It didn't matter to us, because we saw the team played well."